Forgotten painters get a new champion

MARLOW art dealer David Messum has caused a few murmurs in the art world recently.

He has just exhibited a painting in his London gallery which has been hidden from the public's gaze for more than a hundred years.

The painting, by Lucy Kemp-Welch, was bought for the nation by the Chantrey Bequest Fund but it has been buried in the vaults of the Tate Gallery instead of hanging on its walls, as reported in last week's Bucks Free Press.

David decide that it was about time the painting, Colt Hunting in the New Forest, was seen by the public. Lucy Kemp-Welsh was, after all, the artist who painted the original pictures for Anna Sewell's best selling novel Black Beauty.

David remarks: "She was one of the foremost painters of the spirit of the horse. People who are into horses find Lucy's paintings beautiful because she painted with feeling. She wanted to portray the feeling of the horse."

It took David two years to get the painting on loan from the Tate Gallery and he spent £3,000 restoring it.

The painting was only on show for just one week in his gallery, but David feels he has achieved his ambition.

"Although the painting has gone back to the Tate it will not stay there. The painting is going to be found a more permanent home, on view to the general public so we have succeeded in what we set out to do."

By having this exhibition David was also trying to highlight the plight of forgotten paintings. He suggests that there are thousands of paintings by great masters sitting in the bowels of the nation's galleries which are just collecting dust.

"But these paintings were a gift to the nation," he says.

"What is happening is that a lot of the nation's treasures which belong to you and me are being hidden from the public and therefore the public have not got the opportunity to decide whether they like the paintings or not."

The reason why so many of the painting are not exhibited is because they are not in good condition. They have to be cleaned and restored before they can go out on loan.

"I think it is questionable when they spend as much money as they do on new art but they haven't the heart to spend the same amount on the paintings that have already been gifted to them," he says. "It is out with the old and in with the new.

"What we are getting is a warped opinion. We are not seeing half of our art treasures. People have forgotten that people painted like that."

David is on a quest to try to change that attitude.

"I am very keen on contemporary art, but we have such a long history in this country that we do forget how great we were. There is a misconception that everything new is good. My view is that we must always embrace the new but there must be a balanced attitude to harbouring what was good in the past."

This is not a new idea. He has been trying to bring English nineteenth and twentieth century art to the forefront of the art world for many years.

"When I first came into the art business nothing was written about nineteenth and twentieth century British art."

He was involved with the first book on the British impressionist movement, The Garden of Bright Images by Laura Wortley, which includes artists Philip Wilson Steer and Wilfrid de Glehn.

He explains that it wasn't the French who were the first impressionists, it was in fact the English.

"The English had discovered impressionism in the eighteenth century with people like Constable. The English were the greatest landscape painters."

These paintings, he believes, appeal to a lot of people.

"They are attractive good looking pictures but they are not generally on view."

David is trying to find ways of getting these paintings on view. He suggests that they do not necessarily need to be hung in public galleries.

His idea is for the private and public galleries to get together.

"Instead of waiting for the public to visit the art gallery or museum, the gallery would go to them"

He suggests that businesses could temporally hire works of art and hang them in office foyers and corridors.

It would, he says, rescue them from languishing unseen from one generation to the next in storerooms of public galleries all over Britain.

And it would provide an income for the public galleries and museums.

He believes this system could work by all kinds of different leases and loans, long-term and short term sponsorship arrangements which would not require huge sums of money.

"It is a shame that both academic and commercial galleries do not work more closely together. A private run gallery can move more quickly on individual issues and artists who have been forgotten. The big national bodies are caught up in the politics of their job."

By not following the trend along with other art dealers, and going out on a limb trying to promote artists who are not fashionable, David sees himself as a trend-setter.

"I have always sought to research and promote areas of art that have been overlooked."

He discovered Lucy Kemp-Welch in the sixties when he had the opportunity of buying her paintings which were part of an estate he was handling.

These days one of the areas of his work is to look after deceased artists' estates.

He explains that families who had a relative who was an artist and have his or her paintings in their possession might just want to keep one or two of the works, but then they do not know what to do with the rest.

"If they put the paintings into London showrooms they will get today's prices and not tomorrow's. What a gallery can do is research and develop and promote that artist and then act on behalf of the trustees and they benefit from all the work we have put in because they get the developed price."

Lucy Kemp Welch came to him in that way.

"When we first got the estate no-one wanted the paintings."

That was back in the seventies when she was relatively unknown.

In 1975 he produced the first definitive book on her work which was an exhibition catalogue for the sale of the paintings.

"We were totally inundated with interest at that time and the exhibition sold out in a week."

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.